EXCLUSIVE: The Next Standalone Marvel Movie After Cap Takes Place In Wakanda!THE BLACK PANTHER is going to headline his own film!
How do I know? Let’s say I got it from FOUR different trusted sources.
Marvel is going BIG TIME after the urban film audience and I applaud them for that. Last year, it was reported that Marvel hired Mark Bailey to pen the script and I hear the script is fantastic.
The clues were always there. They showed Wakanda on the map in Iron Man 2 and Captain America’s shield is made from Vibranium which also hails from Wakanda. The Black Panther has a long development history which at one point had Wesley Snipes attached to star. Marvel got the rights back to the character in 2005. . . .
Latino Review, June 5

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Note the photo at the bottom of this post from the Iron Man 2 thread:

A sharp-eyed fellow in another forum I frequent observed some cool tie-ins with other Avenger movies, namely the Hulk's rampage in New York, and locations of other future Avengers. Here are the screen-caps of his observations:

I wonder how this will affect the release of other films. The polygon article claims this is the last Phase 3 film before the Infinity War, but the first of that two-parter is set to come out the year before the new release date of Panther. AntMan and Wasp was set to be released in July, 2018, so I'm sure that's changed. So will they move everything back? Or will we have an Antman sequel before the first Black Panther movie?

In the nearly two weeks since the movie opened, I've been asking people if I missed anything regarding one of the film's more understated plot threads. Wakanda, we are told, is an advanced African civilization (with its own internal diversity: it is a conglomeration of five ancient tribes, each with its own culture and leadership structure) that has kept its technological advancements hidden from the world. In one early scene, our hero T'Challa is talking to someone who proposes letting African refugees into the country, and T'Challa says no, he can't do that, because the refugees would turn Wakanda into the sorts of countries that the refugees came from, and Wakanda would cease to be Wakanda. At the end of the film -- after defeating an American who sought to impose his own diversity-denying idea of global racial unity on Wakanda -- T'Challa announces that Wakanda will begin outreach programs around the world... but I don't believe I ever heard him say that he was going to let refugees into the country. He would reach *out* to other nations, but he never said anything about taking other nations *in*. At least, I don't remember him saying anything along those lines...

...and judging from comments like this one by John Ehrett @ The American Conservative, I am not the only one who noticed that the refugee thing is never referenced again (and oh, how I wish we could indent paragraphs again on this website):

"When all’s said and done, there’s a superficial reading of this film’s politics in which Black Panther is a straightforward tale of Wakanda’s journey towards Marvel-approved globalism. To be sure, T’Challa eventually announces the opening of international outreach centers for the sharing of Wakandan knowledge, and suggests that Wakanda will start giving aid to other nations. But Black Panther as globalist propaganda is far too facile an interpretation. Early on, a character denounces T’Challa for not admitting foreign refugees into Wakanda, yet there’s no indication by the film’s conclusion that T’Challa has relented on this point. A screenwriting oversight? Perhaps—or perhaps a subtly provocative unwillingness to flatter audience expectations. A T’Challa who exercises his royal prerogative to prioritize a Wakandan Wakanda over a fully internationalized Wakanda isn’t a character one expects from Hollywood, but it is a much more interesting one."

Other conservative critics have called the film "conservative" or "anti-radical", and the more excitable Breitbart types have apparently claimed that T'Challa is Trump -- which is ridiculous on a thousand levels. (T'Challa respects women, believes in international outreach, etc., etc.) Still, the film is surprisingly not as "woke" as the hype might lead you to think, and I think this complexity, and this relative *restraint* when it comes to the film's political themes, accounts for at least some of the film's success.

On some level I am reminded of the discussion around District 9, which came out nine years ago. Most North American takes on the film filtered it through the lens of apartheid, because when Americans think about South Africa, the only thing they know is apartheid (which came to an end a quarter-century ago). But when I described the plot to my father, who grew up in Africa (and was expelled from South Africa during his student days because he took part in anti-apartheid protests), he immediately intuited that the film was actually primarily about the African refugee crisis -- and sure enough, the film's director (a South African who now lives in Canada) confirmed in interviews that that was, in fact, what the film was about.

On a few occasions, the Wakandan characters tweak the one white American character (a CIA agent who is also a good guy) by calling him a "colonizer". The villain -- who also happens to be the only black American character in the film -- arguably seeks to colonize Wakanda in his own way, by putting American concerns (and other non-Wakandan concerns) first. I find this striking, because the film *itself* is essentially an American fantasy about Africa; the film *itself* is, or at least has the potential to be, a form of commercial and imaginative colonizing. So the villain is kind of doing what the film is doing -- but in a bad way, whereas the film is good (certainly in the eyes of those who made it, and also in the eyes of most of those watching it).

So that's another of the complexities that make this film more interesting than most other Marvel movies.